Songs of Blood and Sword

by Fatima Bhutto

  Papa was excited and nervous. I don’t remember him sitting still in those heady days. All those years of ‘one day’ were finally over. Suhail was going to fly back to Karachi with his comrade and old friend, but the day before the departure, plans were changed and Suhail was to stay behind in Damascus with us. ‘Just in case,’ Papa said, and left it at that.

  On the night of 2 November our small flat was full of friends coming to bid Murtaza farewell. It wasn’t a sad goodbye, but one filled with laughter and music and joy. After all the farewells were said and done, Frank Sinatra was playing on the stereo, and Ghinwa and Murtaza were alone together at last; it was the end of a long, emotional night. Ghinwa turned to her husband and said, ‘So, you did it your way finally?’ But Murtaza didn’t laugh. He smiled softly and shook his head ‘No. I did nothing my way. If I had, things would have been very different today.’

  The next morning I woke up crying. I was so attached to my father, I felt sad every time he travelled, and this time my emotions were multiplied a hundredfold. I was scared for him. And I didn’t want to go to school. I wanted to be at home with Mummy and Uncle Suhail, listening to the news so that I knew Papa was OK. In the hallway, bright and early, my father, who hadn’t slept a minute all night, hugged me and wiped away my tears with his thumbs. ‘Be brave,’ he told me. ‘But you’re going to be arrested,’ I wailed. The newspapers and reports from Pakistan would not let us forget it.A story three days earlier had claimed that Benazir’s government was holding ‘in readiness non-bailable warrants of arrest for Murtaza on arrival’,4 while another article helpfully pointed out that a seasoned criminal like Murtaza was still legally entitled to seek ‘protective bail before arrest’ since he was a member of parliament, if the notion of jail didn’t tickle his fancy.5

  That Papa would be arrested was something we took for granted. He had packed several magazines – Newsweek and The Economist and Vanity Fair, his favourite – to read in jail. He had pen and paper to write letters – which he promised he would have someone fax across to me – and books to keep him company. He was so relaxed about jail, for my sake I’m sure, he made it seem like nothing more frightening than a spa weekend away and even joked that he planned to lose a few pounds while incarcerated.

  I left for school shortly after Papa set off for the airport. We were having a soccer tournament for the regional American schools at DCS and we had the morning off to cheer on our home team. I saw Nora, my best friend, as soon as I walked into the campus gates. She was quiet. ‘May he come back to you exactly as he left you,’ she said, uncharacteristically stoic. Nora is half Armenian and half Syrian; she said it was a traditional saying. I was miserable and moped around school for much of the day, quietly wondering where my father’s plane had got to and trying not to worry. ‘Your father’s making history, you know,’ a teacher who had heard about Papa’s return on the BBC World Service said to me as I stood with Nora by the football field. I felt uneasy all day.

  Hafez al Assad’s presidential plane had received clearance from all the countries it had to fly over, except one – Pakistan. The Syrian Ambassador in Islamabad was dispatched to the Foreign Office to facilitate the landing of the presidential plane and was rudely rebuffed. The government would not allow the plane to land, a move that would have caused a diplomatic incident had Assad not anticipated Benazir’s actions. She was petty, this he knew; it was partly why he had offered Murtaza his plane in the first place. Eventually the aeroplane landed at Dubai International Airport, where Murtaza was received by senior UAE officials, arranged by President Assad, and continued his journey home on board an Ethiopian Airways flight.

  ‘It was such a complex operation,’ Suhail remembers. ‘I was on the phone for twenty-four hours that day – hectic efforts were being made to get Murtaza on a connecting flight to Karachi. We were anxious to get him there on the third as crowds had been gathering at Jinnah Airport. They had been waiting for him since the morning.’6 Hameed Baloch, who had once been an office bearer in the party under Benazir’s leadership, was in Karachi that day and out on the roads outside the airport since the morning. ‘There were Rangers, police vans, we even saw some military vehicles – there were thousands of us workers at the airport to receive Mir baba and it seemed that the job of all the officials there that day was to keep us away. Every couple of hours they would try to confuse us by saying that his flight was landing at the old Karachi airport terminal, fifteen minutes away, and once we had walked there we would be told the flight was landing at the new terminal that we had just left.’7

  In Damascus, we heard the news of the police contingents at the airport. No one had expected the state to put on such a show of force. Murtaza was a Pakistani citizen, he was on board a commercial airliner, and he had said, repeatedly, that he was prepared to face the charges against him. ‘We weren’t worried about his travelling from Damascus to Karachi,’ Suhail says, ‘but we were worried about his security on the ground once he reached Karachi.’ To make sure things were under control, Murtaza’s mother Nusrat was at the airport throughout the day. But she too was being shunted back and forth between terminals along with the rest of the workers who had flocked to see Zulfikar’s eldest son return home. And after four hours of being held at bay, she snapped. Nusrat presented herself at the new airport terminal after having wasted the morning and afternoon driving back and forth between terminals being harangued by officials. Unfortunately, the police officer who made the last feeble attempt to restrict her entry received a smart slap on the face.

  Nusrat was a tough woman who had faced Zia’s military and had been violently attacked in a Lahore stadium during the dark days of the dictatorship. She strode into the airport and waited for her son to arrive, leaving the police officer stinging from the slap but unable to stop her going forward. ‘When we heard that the police were mis-behaving with Begum Sahiba,’ Hameed says, ‘we were prepared to storm the gates of the airport, but the police began to beat us with lathis and lobbed tear gas grenades into the crowds – they were trying to disperse us, to make us leave so Mir baba would return to Pakistan without any support. But we stayed, just so we could be there, just so we could see him.’

  It was night-time when Murtaza finally landed. The police had become more aggressive after dark, taking several workers into custody and facing down the crowds with riot gear, but the crowds resisted, hurling rocks at the police vans as they stopped them from making their way towards the airport. Murtaza walked down the steps alone, seeing Karachi for the first time under cover of night. He knelt on the tarmac and kissed the ground. Nusrat was there, emotional, crying. He embraced his mother and was led away by the police and taken to Landhi Jail in North Karachi. It would be his home for the next eight months.

  None of the workers who had waited under the Karachi sun saw Murtaza that night; he was taken to jail from a side exit. But there was jubilation in the air. He was home, finally.

  Benazir was in power once again and this time she was faced with a different opponent, her brother. He wasn’t some ordinary member of a vague opposition party; he was popularly recognized in patriarchal Pakistan as the heir to the Bhutto throne. She was liable to be replaced and the threat came from within her own family.

  Maulabux found himself in jail too. ‘A number of Murtaza Bhutto’s supporters were jailed during Benazir’s second government. They were afraid of us politically. We had been fighting for the party all our lives, they knew our strength. And we had left them; they had become so corrupt by then, there was nothing left to defend about them.’8

  Over the years I’ve always seen Maulabux and Shahnawaz together. They’re both highly energetic men, even after years spent in jail, and when they speak, their stories often slide into each others. They are both tall, proud-looking men of Sheedi origin; Shahnawaz is the slimmer, quieter, of the two. He had been doing his master’s in public administration at Karachi University when Benazir’s police, around the time of Murtaza’s return, arrested him. ‘In jail there were
no criminal cases against Murtaza Bhutto’s people,’ he says, echoing Mauli. ‘It was purely political – they held us on charges of treason, anti-state activities, those sorts of things.’9 Shahnawaz hired a private lawyer; since he had left Benazir’s PPP he no longer benefited from the party’s legal aid schemes, which he bitterly notes were being put to use defending the new party members who were serving time in jail for corruption, narcotics and extortion.

  Most of those men who had formed a loyal core around Benazir in the days before she came to power had abandoned the party after her first government and had begun to work for Murtaza. They were punished for their desertion with prison sentences. ‘I used to meet Ali Sonara in the Karachi Central Jail dispensary,’ Shahnawaz says. ‘They always kept us in separate cells so we used to meet there to relay messages and keep each other informed of what was going on. The word on the block was that that those who the government managed to flip against Mir baba were being released then badly beaten by the police and then held up at press conferences as examples of what Murtaza Bhutto did to people who deserted him. It was standard procedure for the government. Once, in the dispensary, Ali – who had been in charge of Benazir’s security – told me that Ghous Ali Shah, the advisor to the Chief Minister of Sindh, had offered him a position in the Minister’s office if he would come out and publicly denounce Murtaza Bhutto.’

  The offers were not unattractive, especially considering how Murtaza’s workers were being kept in jail. ‘When I was arrested in 1993,’ Shannawaz goes on, ‘I was kept in illegal custody – there was no warrant for my arrest, no charges were made clear to me. The police used to torture me by putting cigarettes out all over my body.’ I notice the marks on his arms as he speaks. They’re small and dark, angry patches of skin pinched together. What Shahnawaz describes, the warrantless arrests, the lack of judicial procedure, were hallmarks of Benazir’s second regime. The police were empowered to act as a mercenary force, with no regard for law and order or justice. I know this now, but at the time we learned about the human rights abuses as they unfolded, as neighbours were picked up and failed to return, and from the whispered stories about the police torture cells.

  ‘When the police finally took me before a magistrate, I was blindfolded and chained – my hands in one pair of shackles and my legs in another set. They started to throw questions at me and I refused to answer. “Remove my blindfold first,” I demanded and they did and I saw the judge before me was a fellow with such a big beard and the nishan, the sign from daily prayers, etched on his forehead. My arms hurt so much from the torture, I could barely move. I thought he’d help me, being a religious man, and I told him how the police had tortured me for days – I didn’t know how many, I had lost count. I opened my shirt to show him the scars on my chest. And this magistrate, this devout judge, you know what he told me? He said that the police could continue to hold me illegally without warrant or charges for two more days. He sent me away and told the police to bring me back then. Of course, they never did.’10

  It is peculiar to hear these stories, to feel so helpless in hindsight and to know that these men before me suffered at the hands of my aunt, for my father, in ways that I cannot bear to imagine. I sometimes wondered, as a maudlin teenager, how I would hold up under torture. It seemed to be a reasonable thing to ponder, given the stories I grew up hearing, but I’ve never had to find out. I haven’t escaped the question though; it is answered for me by others all too frequently, their scars and their families’ pain the evidence of how they fared under torture.

  Maulabux was also sent to jail in the first month of Benazir’s new government. I ask him why he was imprisoned, and he thinks back to those years and laughs. ‘The case against me in ’93 was made by a local superintendent of police who claims that I was seen planning a murder in Lyari, our area, at midnight one evening. The man I’m meant to have killed dies the same night, at 12.15, fifteen minutes later, in Malir – two hours away. What am I? Superman? How am I supposed to have managed that?’ I laugh along with him. I don’t know what else to do.

  ‘We weren’t with Mir baba for the money,’ Mauli continues. ‘We were in jail, in chains, and we didn’t leave him. We were there for love – this scared Benazir’s people a lot. We couldn’t be bought. One day in jail, Nabeel Gabol came to see me.’ (I know Nabeel Gabol. When I was writing a weekly column for Pakistan’s largest Urdu newspaper I attacked him in several articles over the lack of potable water in Lyari and the electricity power cuts that lasted whole summers. He’s a feckless man who was elected to parliament from Lyari and made a hefty amount of money in Benazir’s first government. He made enough to move out of the area, which is desperately poor, and into the plush suburb of Defence. In her second government, Gabol was elevated to deputy speaker of the Sindh Assembly. The very mention of his name makes me cringe.) Maulabux continued, smiling at the look on my face. ‘He stood in front of me and said, “Mauli, give a press conference and say Murtaza Bhutto’s policies are bad and that you’re leaving him.” I looked at him and asked, “Nabeel, what door did you come in from?” He turned around and pointed – there was only one door in the room – “OK,” I said, “now leave through it.”’ Mauli wheezes into laughter. I like him very much. He’s brave. He radiates courage. He and his wife, also Sheedi, run a free tuition centre on the roof of their apartment building designed to keep Lyari’s poor children off the gang-infested streets.

  ‘They offered money, lots of it, to our friends, other workers, in jail. Some were tortured very badly and gave in, but our feeling was, if we die, then we die, but we’re living for Murtaza. The jailers used to abuse us regularly. They called us “Al Zulfikar boys”, terrorists. They would taunt us as they beat us, saying, “What is your leader Murtaza Bhutto doing for you now?” It was us experienced workers who were on their hit list. When they saw that we didn’t respond to their blows, they would cut us and rub masala into our wounds.’

  I know it’s painful for Mauli to tell me these things and for him and Shahnawaz to admit this humiliation and vulnerability. As we speak, I focus hard on my notebook, on getting their words down, so I don’t have to look at them. Pakistani society is too traditional, too patriarchal for these grown men to share stories of their pain with a young woman half their age. I always imagined I had a high tolerance for disturbing truths and frightening stories, but I’m unable to be professional at moments like these, wanting to apologize instead of just nodding along seriously. As if noticing my unease, Mauli, always jovial, breaks the tempo of the interview and tells me about his encounters with Papa in jail.

  They were both held in Landhi Jail, some two hours away from 70 Clifton. Papa was kept in solitary confinement, removed from the other prisoners lest he launch an in-house recruitment drive. He asked repeatedly to be moved to the common cells and was routinely refused. ‘We were in B class cells and Mir baba was in solitary. One day he sent the warden, a man called Durrani who was charged with guarding him, to our block to ask if Mauli was getting food and if I was eating properly or not. There were many Sindhis in our cells, belonging to other parties, and when they saw that they said, “Vah! We want to join Murtaza Bhutto too.” “Bismillah! ” I said. Mir baba always looked after me and once he sent me clothes from 70 Clifton along with some shalwar kameez that were being brought for him. “These are for Mauli sahib,” I was told. People were shocked that not only was I getting clothes and food sent to me on Murtaza Bhutto’s behalf, but here I was being called sahib ! They thought I was a religious leader or something – they couldn’t understand why Murtaza Bhutto would treat a worker with such affection!’ Mauli laughs and for once I can look at him and smile too.

  Benazir, eager to show that she had no animosity towards her brother, even as he sat in solitary confinement in Landhi Jail, and that the stories of a political falling-out were noorah kushti, pretend feuds, offered Papa Eid parole. The government declared 70 Clifton a ‘sub-jail’ for the duration of the holiday. Papa refused his sister’s charitab
le invitation. ‘I will only accept the Prime Minister’s offer if all political prisoners are awarded the same parole for Eid and are allowed to be with their families too.’ Of course, Benazir said no. We, Mummy, Zulfi, Joonam and I were kept – somewhat comically and somewhat frighteningly – under ‘sub-jail’ status for the first day of Eid. A special treat, I suppose, freed from the bizarre house arrest after twenty-four hours.

  We reached Karachi from Damascus in mid-December, arriving at 70 Clifton at night. We were worried about Papa being in jail and wondered all the time what his conditions were like. Though he was kept in solitary confinement, in a cell with only a small cot and a urinal and sink in the corner, Papa downplayed the spartan conditions. He joked that he had made friends with the lizards who lived on his ceiling and the cockroaches that crept out of the drains at night. He told a magazine that it was a great feeling to be back home after exile, but pointed out that he was unsure of the government and his sister’s hostility towards him when he landed.

  I was saying I hope they don’t torture me now when I am so sleepy. When I wake up they can do whatever they want. It took me sometime to adjust . . . They took me straight to jail. Sometimes I was awakened and there were guards outside speaking in Urdu. It had been so many years, I would say to myself, ‘Oh, there are Pakistanis outside.’ I thought I was still in Syria or some place. Then I would remember I’m in Pakistan. Of course, there are Pakistanis in Pakistan!11

  The house at 70 Clifton felt empty when we arrived. Joonam had been its sole occupant for some time and she travelled frequently and didn’t have the energy to run the huge house in the manner that it had been accustomed to during the days it hosted state dinners and functioned as a Prime Minister’s residence. Mummy moved her and Papa’s things into the guest room downstairs, and I raced up the stairs desperate to claim my father’s old room. Sensing my eagerness, Joonam put her foot down and declared that I had to move into the old girls’ room. I didn’t want to live in Benazir’s old room. It was painted black. The bookshelves – only three – were full of her Mills and Boon romance novels and there was no space for my things. In my annoyance at having to move into the one room I didn’t want, I asked Joonam if my aunt could come and take her things. I didn’t want to keep them.